


The Sky Above Her Grave

by ester_inc



Category: Marvel (Movies), The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Apocalypse, Disturbing Themes, Future Fic, Gen, Magic, Mild Gore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-05
Updated: 2013-02-05
Packaged: 2017-11-28 08:15:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,020
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/672220
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ester_inc/pseuds/ester_inc
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>No one survives the end of the world, but sometimes they last long enough to witness the birth of a new one.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Sky Above Her Grave

**The End**

The sky was empty and colorless, like it had never seen a sunrise. There were no clouds, and there was no wind.

Natasha dropped her gaze, her eyes aching. The tips of her boots, dull with dust and grime, looked alien against the frost-covered ground. She made a fist, but even the bite of her nails against her palm wasn't enough to push through the fog in her head. Forcing herself to move, she took a step, then another.

 _Still water_ , someone had once told her, _will stagnate and evaporate_ ; and though she could not recall the face or the name of the speaker, Natasha did remember the sound of their voice, low and melodic, saying, _be a river, Natalia; be swift and sure_.

It was the twentieth day, and Natasha was the last river on Earth.

-

Under the frost, the ground was cracked and dry, the pavement brittle, crumbling under its own weight. Natasha hadn't seen another living thing in twenty-eight days. All around her, the corpse of New York City, with its empty streets and broken buildings, stood silent and still. 

The skeleton of Stark Tower, which she'd visited once, twenty-six days ago, had left Natasha with a hollow space inside her chest, a bird's nest filled with knowledge she accepted to be true but could not bring herself to linger on.

She had no delusions left, bar one: there had to be a reason she was still here, alive, in this graveyard of a city. She was supposed to find something. It was a conviction based on her one attempt to leave the city and confirm what she already knew -- that all she would find outside the ruins of New York was more ruin. 

The ache in her bones had gotten worse the further away she'd gotten, her insides twisting with every step she took, until she'd felt a tug under her ribs, as if the city had buried a fishing hook there and was reeling her back in.

Within the city, her bones still ached, but less; it was so distant a concern as to be no kind of a concern at all. 

In the days following, she'd left footprints in the ashes of dead trees in Central Park; she'd seen the remains of the Hudson River, its dry, gaping jaws; she'd walked in circles and in straight lines, looking for something she wasn't sure she'd recognize once it was found.

She didn't get hungry, and she didn't feel thirst, but she was getting weaker, her body breaking apart a little more with every passing moment.

She was losing herself, one atom at a time.

-

She recognized this: the weight of a name on her tongue. It wasn't a name she would have chosen, but its bitter, sharp flavor was familiar enough to make her breath catch in her throat.

Time had frozen the moment she'd caught sight of him, some hundred feet away, and began anew when he started laughing -- a thin, ragged sound that made Natasha's fingers twitch. 

There were long, gaping gashes under Loki's ribs on his left side, and when he started walking toward her, it was with a limp. Awareness, uncomfortable and sorely missed, spiked along Natasha's nerves. She shifted her stance, watching Loki's approach.

"The spider," Loki said when he was close enough, laughter lingering in the sickly upward curve of his mouth. "Surviving in the dark when all others fall."

"Not all others," Natasha said. Facing him, her head held high, she almost felt like her old self. Such a strange thing to feel under the circumstances, gratitude -- and for Loki of all people. 

"Not quite," Loki agreed. "Not yet."

Natasha's gaze lingered on the gashes under his ribs, the mangled, filthy flesh that still glistened, wet, in places. She pressed a thumb against a weeks old cut on her own cheek that showed no signs of healing. When she lowered her hand, there was blood. She rubbed her fingers together, thinking of Before.

"Were you here when everything started falling apart?" She asked. "Did you fight?"

"I fought," Loki said, simple, like a truth. 

Natasha didn't ask whose side he'd been on before inevitably choosing his own. It hardly mattered now. "And then you survived."

"Yes."

"How?" 

Natasha knew how she had survived -- magic not meant for her, and luck that didn't feel like luck. Loki's continued existence, however, could hardly have been an accident, and Natasha suspected his methods to have been questionable at best.

"How did I survive?" Loki tilted his head, his eyes a little unfocused. "Magic," he said. "Magic and sacrifice."

 _Whose sacrifice?_ Natasha didn't voice the thought.

"Am I going to have to fight you?" She asked, meeting Loki's odd, pale eyes without flinching. She almost wanted the answer to be yes. Violence she knew. Violence she could deal with.

"Surely you already know the answer to that," Loki said. "There is little sense in killing something that is already dead, Agent Romanoff. Fighting you would benefit neither of us."

"We are the walking dead," Natasha said, more to herself than to Loki. Clint would have gotten a kick out of that, once upon a time, in another lifetime. She raised her chin. "Your body might last longer than mine, but you're just as damned. Why would you go to the trouble of lasting this long?"

Loki's gaze flickered away from her, into the endless maze of silent streets and gutted buildings. "There is something here I need to find." 

Natasha blinked, slow and careful. "Do you know what it is you're looking for?"

And Loki said: "Something new."

-

"My team," Natasha said three days after finding out she wasn't alone. She wanted to take the words back the moment they left her lips, but there was nothing for it -- and perhaps, should time be rewritten at her whim, she would choose to say them again regardless.

Loki's expression was unreadable, his eyes veiled. _Sentiment_ , Natasha thought with brittle amusement. 

But at length, Loki granted her an answer. "Dead. Though you knew that, of course. The monster lasted the longest -- I saw it, a time or two, near the containment field that held you. A spider, immortalized within a drop of amber. It is fitting, if you think of it."

Natasha looked away, swallowing with a dry click of her throat. The hollow space inside her chest expanded and contracted along with her lungs as she inhaled and exhaled.

"You are Russian," Loki said when she remained silent. His tone was vaguely questioning but contained no curiosity. "Or you were. You do not weep for what cannot be changed."

It was true in a literal sense; Natasha had not wept.

"Reminding me of the day we first met," she said. "Not the greatest idea you've ever had."

Loki made the sort of sound a generous person could have called a chuckle, but it had been a long time since Natasha had felt like being generous, and so, to her, it sounded like wind rasping through dead leaves.

"A spider without a bite," Loki said, "spinning webs that won't hold its own weight."

"And you," Natasha replied in kind, "a snake, pretending to be a god. Whose skin did you hide in, until it was safe to come out?"

Loki made that rasping sound again. "Do you feel safe, Agent Romanoff? Does not your very soul feel the weight and decay of a dying world? Oh, it does. It _trembles_ with the knowledge of what is to come." 

"If my webs won't hold, then neither do your words," Natasha said, unperturbed.

There was a cold, odd little smile twisting Loki's lips. "Ah, but I've spun mine far longer than you've been alive, little spider. I am not yet done."

It might be that Loki was right. It might be that he had one more trick in him, one more lie, but it meant little to Natasha. She wasn't getting out of this. If Loki did -- if he somehow ended up being all that was left of the world -- then Natasha welcomed him to it. Let Loki have his kingdom of dust, his crown of ash. Natasha wanted no part in it.

They walked on, searching for what, Natasha still wasn't sure. There was no sound in the world apart from the air rattling in their lungs and the words they pushed out with that air -- words that fell like stones from their lips for the other to pick up and carry or throw away. 

Dead air and stones. This was who they were to each other, even now. This was who they were, now. The last two people in existence, their hearts beating out of sync.

-

Natasha was alive because there was still work to be done. This had always been true; for better or for worse, she'd always lived for a cause.

It took some time and patience to find out what the objective of her current mission was, but those were small, expected sacrifices she'd paid countless times before. They settled upon her shoulders like a comfortable old coat, and though they could not begin to fill the hollow spaces within her, they were a comfort nonetheless. 

The day her patience was rewarded, she watched as a big, black bird climbed into the vast, empty sky. She kept her eyes on it, the bird that wasn't a bird.

The shape Loki was in, every beat of his wings had to hurt, but perhaps it was indistinguishable from how he felt in his usual form; there came a point where the mind accepted pain as the default, and freedom from it as the anomaly. 

Natasha flexed her hands to remind herself of the ache in them. When she lost sight of Loki, she closed her eyes and didn't open them until she heard the beat of wings again. She wasn't sure whether it was relief or disappointment she felt, watching as Loki slid from bird to man like he knew no difference between the two.

There was a mad, triumphant gleam in Loki's eyes. 

"You found something," Natasha said.

"Yes," Loki said. "This way; you'll see soon enough."

Natasha didn't ask why he'd come back for her.

-

Three hours later, she saw a flash of white from the corner of her eye. At first, she thought it had been a mere trick of light. Then another flash caught her eye, and there, twenty feet to her left -- a transparent, faintly glowing shape, almost humanoid in form, drifted by.

"What was that?" She asked when it had faded. 

Loki glanced at her before facing forward again. He was touching his left side, but not like he was trying to ease the pain; it looked more like curiosity that had become a habit. "A specter. Memory of something that was once alive."

"A ghost?" Natasha asked. She'd seen stranger things.

"More accurately, a last wish made reality; we'll be seeing more of them shortly. None of them will be human in origin," Loki added after a brief pause. "Any specters of mortals, we would have seen already -- these are just arriving. It takes knowledge of your approaching death, and determination to see beyond it, to leave behind the kind of intent that lingers and tries to accomplish what you could not."

"We're following them," Natasha said, catching sight of another one at the end of the street. "Why?"

"The same reason they are here. Hope," Loki offered with a tiny, humorless smile. "It is in the nature of even the most wretched of beings to cling to it, right to the bitter end."

Natasha tilted her head, thinking about it. What hope was she clinging to? What bitter end was she heading toward?

"Hopes and dreams," she said, "have never done much for me. And you and I -- we already lived through the bitter end."

Loki pressed his fingers into one of the gashes at his side, his rasping laughter spilling from between his lips. "Ah, spider. Let me tell you a story about hopes and dreams.

"Many millennia ago, a tree was born, and as it matured, worlds blossomed upon its branches and clung to its roots. It was one of a kind, this tree, as far as anyone knew. As time passed and life flourished on the planets it fed, it was given many names and worshiped in many ways. Some places, some beings, never knew how their existence depended upon the tree, and yet others forgot.

"One of the worlds nourished by the tree was called Asgard; another, Midgard. One remembered, and the other forgot. Both fell in the end, and there is but two creatures left to miss either."

"And so the moral of the story," Natasha said, "is that hopes and dreams are for fools. And that we are fools, the both of us."

"We are certainly on a fool's errand. You, Agent Romanoff, because it is in your nature to look for a purpose. I, Loki of Asgard, Loki of Jotunheim, because of a promise extracted in blood."

"This story," Natasha said, tucking Loki's comment about a promise extracted in blood for later. "You know, don't you? You know why everything's falling apart. Why the laws of physics have ceased to apply."

"Yes," Loki said, as if he hadn't skirted around the truth for days, "and so do you. It is devastatingly simple, is it not?"

"Yggdrasil." The word fell from her lips with ease. "The world tree."

"Yes," Loki said, softer. "We are dying because the source of all life is dying."

"Then what hope is there for you to cling to?" Natasha asked. "What promise are you honoring now, at the end of everything, when you've broken so many before?"

"You'll see," Loki said, "soon enough."

-

Loki had been right; there were more of them. Specters, some blinking in and out of existence like a bad radio signal, others a steady transmission, all silent and heading to the same direction. 

In the end, they arrived at a street corner not unlike any other, except for the way the specters were heading right for it, and the way they disappeared into thin air once reaching it. This close to it, Natasha could feel it, that fish hook pull in her chest. There was something huge here, something so _alive_ that after weeks of nothing but death and decay, Natasha felt dizzy with it.

"Underground," Loki said, his voice sounding almost pained. "Come."

They found the the nearest subway entrance and took the tunnel leading back to where they'd come from. 

It was just a glow at first -- not like the specters from other worlds, but soft, golden. Even though she walked right toward it, for long moments Natasha saw nothing but the light. She was ten feet away when she realized what she was looking at, and then could not stop until her hands were pressed against it; it was the most perfect apple tree, a half-remembered childhood dream, and the bark was warm under her touch, almost alive, pulsating gently against her fingertips.

There had been times, in her life, when she'd felt some measure of peace. Nothing compared to this.

"What do you see?"

Natasha frowned faintly, watching her hands rather than turning to look at Loki. "It's a tree. An apple tree, more perfect than any I've seen before."

Loki hummed softly. "I see a tree, also, but mine has a white trunk and golden leaves; a tree from my mother's garden."

They weren't seeing the same tree, and therefore -- "It's not a tree."

"It is an idea of a tree," Loki said, still behind her, but closer.

"Yggdrasil," Natasha said. _Something new_ , Loki had said. "A sapling."

"A sapling," Loki repeated. "Yes. Turn around, Natalia."

Yes, Natasha thought as she turned; predictable. There was Loki, and in his hand, a dagger.

"Who was it that sacrificed themselves to get you this far?" Natasha wondered aloud, as if she hadn't already figured out the answer. "Who spilled their blood to make sure you would not go back on your promise?"

"I made the sacrifice," Loki spat out. "His blood was spilled by my hand."

Slowly, Natasha reached out and took the hand holding the dagger, drawing it forward until the tip was pressing against her stomach. 

"You made a promise to Thor." Natasha doubted Thor had known the execution of said promise would involve gutting a teammate, but none of that mattered now. "I assume it has to do with the continued well-being of the sapling. I assume you need my blood for it."

"To ensure the dawn of a new world," Loki said, his voice hoarse. "That insufferable, self-sacrificing oaf. What I wouldn't give for a chance to kill him again."

"You'll have to settle for me," Natasha said, finding there was a little bit of anger left in her after all. She yanked, and the dagger sunk into her stomach, painless, easy. She fell back against the trunk of her apple tree, and all the anger bled out of her.

Her breathing was shallow, but still there was no pain. Loki was watching her with a closed-off expression.

"I did have hopes of trapping a spider," he finally said, his voice like a sigh, "back when I laid down the amber."

Then he smiled, all teeth, and twisted the knife.

 

**The Beginning**

Buried under the Tree of Life, there is a woman. Her eyes are blue like the sky, and her hair is red like sunset. Her blood nourishes the Tree, upon which all life depends on.

Some say she was a warrior who died to save the world. Others say she is not dead but merely sleeps, and in a time of great need, she will Awaken and come to our aid; yet others claim that her Awakening would only weaken the Tree, and thus herald the end of days. 

The only thing anyone knows for sure, whether they admit it or not, is that it's an old story. No one remembers who told it first; but everyone remembers her.


End file.
